Sustainable work

Today’s world needs new ways of working

The world is becoming faster and more complex, so it requires continuous adaptability. Today’s banking problems demand personalised and digital solutions, which depend on agile and multidisciplinary ways of working. To become more adaptable, it’s expected that 58% of a bank’s work will be outsourced, offshored, or performed remotely. Although many banks already have a blend of onsite and remote practices, future technologies will help them truly virtualise the working environment, and distribute the workforce further and more effectively. 

This technology shift – along with changing career perceptions and aspirations – will make possible more adaptable, multidisciplinary and fluid teams. They’ll be more agile, so banks can respond quickly to opportunities, but these new ways of working will need to be managed more consciously, to deploy the right team, with the right experience, at the right time.

Building the new talent pool

The current position

Today’s labour market is showing trends that could leave banks unprepared for the future. 74% of banks expect their technology rollouts to be delayed because of skills shortages, and CEOs expect broader skills shortages to be the main disruptor of business strategy over the coming year.

Today’s emerging talent thinks differently about work: 40% of Gen Z said they’d like to leave their current employer within the next year (“the great resignation”), while a similar proportion of both Gen Z and Millennials have rejected a job because it didn’t align with their values. Meanwhile, the financial industry is becoming over-reliant on an older (55+) workforce, which almost doubled in number between 1998 and 2018. As those workers retire over the next five to ten years, the industry will lose a disproportionate amount of deep industry knowledge and relationships.
 

Tomorrow’s skills mix

Delivering a personalised banking service requires different skills from traditional banking, and the workers with those new skills will demand new values and purpose from their work.

Just as early technologies took physical work off our hands and moved the skills focus to our rational minds, today’s technologies are now shifting the focus to our creative minds and hearts. The past century has seen us evolve from Taylorism, to a financial management ethos, to technology as the differentiator. Half the predictions suggest that technology will commoditise some current skills further, so the personal character of the workforce will become the new point of differentiation. That means tomorrow’s banking will be more reliant on human skills such empathy, judgement and creativity.

Meanwhile, many established technologies have become routine skills for today’s digital natives, so future banking could go further, relying on AI, cloud engineering and cybersecurity to provide competitive edge. Banks will therefore need to acquire talent with these advanced technology and creative skills, if they are to become full technology organisations.

However, banks aren’t traditionally organised to attract these human, creative and advanced technology skills, so to meet their future labour requirements, they must overhaul their talent strategies. Importantly, financial compensation has less power as an incentive for that talent pool, and banks must therefore become more creative about how they attract and retain the new skills they need. In particular, their Employee Value Proposition must put more focus on purpose, empowerment and autonomy.


A workplace that embraces new skills, and people

Traditionally, workplace culture has favoured career bankers – typically with a tenure of more than ten years. However, the bank of the future should be more focused on skills-based hiring, and create an environment that’s attractive to a wider range of talent – particularly with essential people and technology skills. For instance, some employers are already becoming active in wider circles than those usually associated with banking, such as technology or community groups, to diversify their appeal and reach. Although banking has traditionally recruited through job postings and personal connections, a more transparent approach to matching skills with job requirements will build trust, and empower future employees to take greater ownership of their careers. A data-driven approach to skills will not only be more objective in recognising the best talent for a given role, but can also inform skills planning and career development.


New career and development models

Beyond recruitment, banking must review and revise its training and development, both to remain attractive to new talent, and to up- or re-skill its existing staff for the work of the future. In line with the new workplace culture, such initiatives should be centred on the employee experience. Future careers won’t involve scaling a pyramid: instead, progression will become more varied. While banks have traditionally offered a linear path, upward through an institutional structure, future strategies should focus on enabling more varied career progressions, driven by individual learning and development opportunities. Meanwhile, career management will shift from coaching key individuals, to recognising the changing talent pools from which future skills can be sourced.

Although customers and technology will bring a shift in the purpose and machinery of banking, making that shift happen needs us to reconsider the very nature of the work, workplace and workforce. Today’s labour trends make that all the more pressing, if banks wish to win the best talent in an increasingly competitive market, they have to make use of distributed talent pools that mix in-house with outsourced, onsite with remote workers, in a broad skills mix.